Plans and Progress

By far the most frequent question I get is “when will Pirates and Traders 2 be done”. The answer to that is the annoying – but unfortunately accurate – “when it is done”. Software development is my passion, but developing games is only the part of that which I do for fun. This means I have to balance game development time with all the other activities of my life, which means my work hours are limited, irregular, and ultimately need to be at least a little fun (otherwise I burn out). The latter is one of the reasons why I decided to combine the three projects that I’m currently working on – it may not be the most efficient way to develop, but being able to switch contexts every once in a while or experiment on something different, is one of the ways in which I maintain motivation. But I digress; the point of this, of course, is to note that this situation makes it completely impossible for me to say when anything will be done. There are just too many variables that can affect the situation.

What I can do, is try to describe the status of things right now, and what I hope to do in the coming months. Just … keep in mind that all developers (myself included) are invariably hopelessly overconfident, so take any timelines here with the huge grain of salt that it deserves.

Small Battles is currently in a playable state; i.e., you can start up a battle, take your turns, have the AI take turns, and at some point you either win or lose. There are a few bugs in the gameplay still and the AI is still not good, but overall, I believe that the game engine is solid now (testing has not turn up any crash bugs). At the moment, I am working on adding some of the remaining missing features (e.g., making it possible for the player to deploy their forces) and handling the end of multiplayer games, but once that is in place, the game is pretty close to being release-worthy. Assuming no unforeseen issues, I hope to get most of this work done by the end of the month, and would like to try and release an open beta of Small Battles before the end of the year.

Pirates and Traders 2 development is going well. The story engine is looking good, sea combat works, and map movement is OK (the latter two still need some tweaks, though). A big part of the work remaining is to script the port interactions, and develop the user interface to give proper feedback. It’s not difficult work, but it is time-consuming; and given the things on my calendar for December-January, I’m not going to get through that work on this side of the New Year. Once I’m done, though, I plan to do the first round of beta testing. I would love it if this was possible to do before the end of the February, but that is probably my optimism talking.

Dwarf Kingdom shares a lot of code with Pirates and Traders 2, so a lot of the work that needs to be done there is stuff I’ll be doing while working on the latter. In addition to that, of course, there is a bunch of game specific mechanisms that need to be implemented. Some has been done already during earlier work on the game; the rest is waiting to be done. This has been taking longer than I would like it to, but my hope would be to move right from the beta of P&T2 to implementing the last remaining bits of this game, and hopefully starting up that beta during the summer of next year.

So that’s the plan. In a perfect world, where I could guarantee spending 15-20 hours of my free-time a week working on that plan, this might even be doable. In the real world, though? Not a chance… one, if not all, of these goals are guaranteed to slip. So when they do… don’t be too disappointed. But there you have it.